EXES - A Second Chance Billionaire Romance Novel
Page 17
That might take extra time to prepare… she replied, neither denying nor committing to it.
Damn straight you little whore, he thought as his eyes raked over the hidden curves of her body, chewing on all the lascivious ways he could seduce her without having to reveal it was him. God, he was such an amoral son-of-a-bitch. And yet, he couldn’t help it because he wanted her back in his life and back in his bed.
Dirty and devious, he thought. But he wanted to push her to the edge he was standing, just to see if she would jump with him. He watched her reading his text and wondered if she would flounder in front of him or excuse herself to the bathroom and prove she actually had more balls than he did.
Let’s just keep you guessing on what I plan to wear tonight…and whether or not your tongue will enjoy it.
Harvey groaned and fell to his knees, just to prevent himself from rushing at her like a madman, pinning her to the ground, and forcing his hot wet tongue into her saucy little mouth until she realized he had been the one to make her come last night—and he could be the one to make it happen again and again.
After a minute of wallowing in his sexual frustration, she finally looked up from her phone. “What’s wrong with you, anyway? Sugar rush?”
Sugar rush? He narrowed his eyes, tracking her approach like a tiger ready to pounce, imagining all the ways he could make her feel her own damn sugar rush.
“Sort of,” he muttered.
“Well, probably best to lay off Big Blue for a while.” She plucked off the top tuft of his cotton candy, taunting him with the way she curled the soft tendrils of fluffy confection around her finger before sucking it off.
“Keep picking at my cotton candy like that, I’ll make you eat the whole thing.”
Stealing away a second tuft, she flashed him a sassy smile and strutted away toward the gallery entrance.
She had better run away, Harvey thought, estimating how many bags of cotton candy it would take to wrap a soft nest of sweetness around her naked body clad in only white crotchless panties. The stark silence outside the gallery’s entryway confirmed they were the only people in the vicinity. Most tourists never walked all the way to the end of the interior pier, and most locals never went there at all.
Slipping through the glass doors, she disappeared into the shadows of the dim gallery, bathed in the muted glow of stained glass. He watched her petite figure pass from darkness into a mystical swath of colorful opalescent light before drifting back into darkness again. Like a nymph returning home, he reflected, as she stopped in front of her favorite Tiffany motif—a landscape scene of wild passion flowers, their bursts of turquoise and emerald green foliage intricately replicated with mottled and confetti glass.
The same spot where he’d proposed.
He pulled back the glass doors and followed her into the shadows.
“Still your favorite one?” he asked quietly.
“I never get tired of looking at it,” she whispered, almost to herself.
“Well, I think it’s safe to say you might be the only one.” He swept his finger along the dusty edges of the window, wondering if they were the only visitors to the gallery in days, maybe even weeks.
“Most people aren’t interested in stained glass unless it’s Aunt Bee’s thirty dollar hand-me-down that looks a lot like the thirty-thousand dollar Tiffany dragonfly lampshade on that antiques TV show.”
“Really?” Harvey mused. “How could they possibly not be interested in learning more about this guy?” Standing in front of the cathedral window, he mimicked the depiction of the archangel Michael holding up a sword, preparing for battle.
“Because people want something they can hang up on their bathroom wall, not something with historical and artistic significance.”
“Yeah, it would be pretty hard to take a piss in front of a righteous archangel threatening to maim me where it counts.”
She stole back his cotton candy and finished its last fluffy tuft. “I think most men would probably clean the toilet seat better if a righteous archangel was threatening to maim them if they didn’t.”
“Hey,” Harvey cawed, seriously offended. “I always cleaned our toilets. And our showers. And I did all our laundry. You may have hated all the buildings that I bought and all the money that I made, but I should at least get a gold star for domesticity.”
“I bought you an apron and oven mitts for your birthday, didn’t I?”
“And I wore them every time I cooked us dinner. And cleaned the dishes.”
“I cleaned the dishes,” Alma corrected him. “You just re-cleaned them.”
“Because the dishwasher doesn’t work unless you put them in there—cleaned first.”
“That’s what the dishwashers are for, Harvey.”
“That’s just what those dish soap commercials want you to believe.”
“Okay, fine, you win.” She threw up her hands, sensing his need for validation. “You were the perfect housewife, Harvey. Gold star, A+.”
“Thank you very much. The defense rests his case.”
She had stopped paying attention to him, stolen away by haunting beauty of the various stained-glass windows within the gallery. He could be as witty and charming as he wanted to be, but ultimately, it was nearly impossible to compete for her attention if there were antiques in the room.
He stuffed his hands in his pocket and circled in front of the mysterious window in a secluded corner of the gallery. “So what do you think our boy Louis is trying to tell us by sending us on this wild goose chase?” he called out, noting how the window’s title matched the inscription in the wallpaper—The Guiding Angel.
“I don’t know…” She moved toward him, scanning the window like a mother who had seen her child a thousand times, but every fresh glimpse still offered a new experience of enchantment. “But I know that finding a collection of stained-glass windows, fully intact and without significant damage in the middle of Chicago is like finding a bag of diamonds in the middle of an abandoned field. How could you not wonder where they came from or how they got there?”
“Because I would only want to know how much they were worth, and if there could be more?” Harvey slyly insinuated.
“If you cared about whether or not there could be more, then you probably shouldn’t bulldoze the best clue we have to finding whatever else might be out there.”
“Easier said than done, Miss Castillo. I can’t exactly sit on a piece of property that’s under contract for over a hundred million dollars, especially since the proceeds from the sale will roll right into my next project, which is the kind of opportunity that comes along only once in a lifetime.”
She placed her hands on her hips and challenged him. “Oh really? What’s that?”
He squared his stance against her own, confident in his ability to impress her with his answer. “I’m going to build the tallest towers in the world.”
She exuded the longest nasal wheeze in the history of mankind. “Ohhhhhh…brother.”
He frowned. “I get a gold star for cleaning dishes, but building the tallest towers in the world gets me sinus congestion?”
“What do they look like?” she asked, more like an interrogation than a question.
“What do you mean what do they look like?” he repeated, feeling the need to stall his answer. “I only have preliminary designs. They haven’t been fully—”
“They look like two big penises jutting into the sky, don’t they?”
Harvey placed his hands on his hips, just to mirror her conviction, and pondered her suggestion. “Well, not exactly like penises.”
She rolled her eyes and cleared more sinus congestion.
“Alma,” Harvey stressed, spreading open his hands, seeking only an ounce of sympathy. “Asking a man to pick moral righteousness over penile prowess is like asking a dog not to scratch at his own mange-infested neck.”
“So in this scenario, you’re saying I have to buy you one of those dog cones, just to keep you from selling the river
front parcel?”
“It probably would help.”
“Harvey…if you need to publicly wear a cone of shame, just to get you to do the right thing, then I don’t think anyone can help you. Not even me.”
“C’mon…don’t be like that,” he implored, grabbing her hand, testing her acceptance of his touch. He didn’t come here to fight with her and he wanted her to know it. “What really are the chances that all those windows in my train depot are authentic Tiffany’s, huh?”
She heaved a long drawn-out sigh and tugged back against his grasp. “I don’t know…would it matter to you either way?”
He reinforced his hold over her hand and nodded. “Yes, because it would matter to you.”
His conviction unnerved her. Her hand trembled within his own.
“I would need more time to study them in order to answer that. Tiffany wasn’t the only person working with opalescent glass at that time, and they could have been made by any number of craftsmen working with him. So, it’s hard to know right now if they really were designed and produced by Tiffany, and if not…then you’re probably right. The building itself might not be worth saving at all.” She forced herself away from him, as if she needed to maintain their physical separation in order to justify her emotional one. “Which would mean it’s impossible to know if the Eternal Love is something that really exists or if it’s just a sad, desperate wish.”
Alma’s voice trailed off as she stopped in front of a luminous stained-glass window depicting an angel embracing two cherubic angels.
“But there were letters about it, right?” Harvey said, encouraging her in a way that surprised himself.
She nodded. “There are letters, written by Tiffany’s sister-in-law after the unexpected death of his first wife. He was so heartbroken that he literally dropped off their young children at his sister-in-law’s house and disappeared for almost a year. I guess it’s a romantic fantasy to believe that he spent that year pouring his heartache and grief into a memorial window—a masterful expression of his exquisite genius—inspired by his eternal love for her.”
“Or maybe he just drank himself silly for that entire year,” Harvey interjected. “I know that’s what I did when I lost my wife.”
She crossed her arms, confronting him. “Except your wife didn’t die.”
“Yeah, she chose to leave. Way worse.”
“Well, even you, Mr. Ballbuster, felt the need to commemorate it, didn’t you?”
“Just consider it my masterpiece of exquisite genius.” Harvey smarted back, like a teenager reveling in the amusement of his own bad behavior.
“I’m sure you make good use of it, Harvey. In fact, I bet you order them for all your dates.”
“Like a test, just to see if they can handle it?” he asked, catching her by the hand as she attempted to drift away from him. “They can’t, of course.”
She avoided meeting his gaze, but the gentle touch of her free hand against his chest convinced him that she yearned for a time when they were lovers, not enemies.
“Tell me, Miss Castillo,” he said in a hushed voice, his lips only an inch away from her own. “If I had been a little less of a jerk the last few months of our marriage, would you have reconsidered divorcing me?”
She shut her eyes as if his question truly pained her. “Are you actually admitting to the fact that you were a jerk?”
Lifting her chin to meet his gaze, he searched out any sign of forgiveness. “I’ve admitted to being worse.” Then, glancing back at the archangel, he said, “And now that I’m under threat of being maimed by a supernatural force, I suppose it’s easier to admit the fact that I know I’m not the easiest guy to love, honor and cherish—forever.”
“I don’t think there was anything you could have done. You and I had grown so far apart in every way that we seemed like strangers.”
She tried to pull away from him, but he was stronger and more determined to keep her in his arms. “And how does it feel right now, stranger?”
“It feels like you need to go your way and I need to go mine.”
“But what happens if we start going the same way again?” he offered.
“Harvey—” she said his name in a way that foreshadowed her rejection. “Thank you for agreeing to salvage the windows in your train depot. But it doesn’t change the fact that—”
“That…it’s still not enough,” he said, completing her thought.
“Harvey…” she bowed her head like a plea for him to stop. “This…distance between us isn’t about the windows or your buildings or your money.”
“No? What then?” He searched her eyes, trying to kindle that same spark of passion that she carried for her long-lost window.
“It’s about everything between us being so much harder now than it used to be.”
“Then let’s try to make it feel easier again, Alma. Let’s try.”
“Harvey—” She shook her head, struck by the irony that he was now the hopeless romantic. “You’re…” She hesitated before peering down at his pants. “Vibrating.”
“I thought you generally like that,” he replied, unflinching.
She cracked a reluctant smile, and for a moment, they were united. But the persistent buzz of his phone quickly disrupted the mood, spurring her to seek an escape from his embrace.
He relented, letting her go. This time. But he recognized regret in her voice, a longing for the way things used to be between them, and it filled him with more than just sexual desire. It filled him with hope.
He didn’t bother to pull out his phone or check the message. Instead, he doubled back to the mysterious window of the angel enveloping a woman within its opalescent wings, protecting her. He stared at the window, waiting for something unusual or strange to jump out at him. Instead, he only had one thought—serenity.
His gaze lowered along the curve of the angel’s wings, its mythical feathers layered like waves of pearl, lavender, teal and celestial blue until he reached the base of the window and spotted a series of numbers etched into the surface of the lead frame.
“Alma?” he said her name quietly, not sure he wanted to show her what he had discovered. Then, realizing he couldn’t withhold it, he repeated her name, the second time, with more conviction. “Alma? Do these numbers mean anything to you?”
She drifted over to the window as he swiped his fingers along the frame, removing mounds of dust partially obscuring them. “Like some type of auction house inscription to tag and track the window?”
She leaned in and read off the series of numbers. “No, it’s nothing that I recognize.”
He closed his eyes, like she had just shot him in the back. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
She curiously looked at him. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Because I recognize those numbers.” He heard the edge within his own voice harden like steel. “That’s a surveyor’s legal description for a parcel of land—the plat survey system. Every piece of property in every county in every state has its own unique numerical description based on the subdivision of land into lots and blocks.”
“And you recognize those numbers?” Alma said distrustfully, as if she knew better than to believe him.
“Yeah,” he replied solemnly, turning away from the window. “Because I’ve seen it a hundred times in the past week. That’s the legal description for my riverfront parcel. It’s listed on every document pertaining to the sale.”
He tried to control his urge to punch his fist through one of those damn windows.
“So we’ve been sent all this way, just to be sent back to the beginning?” Alma insisted. “But that doesn’t make any sense.”
“It does if there’s something about my property that’s more important than we realize...”
Their eyes locked. What had he just said? What did it even mean? He wasn’t sure and neither was she. Silence fell between them as they both stared at the window, attempting to piece together the significance of the numeric clue below it.
Alma chased after him down the gallery toward the exit. “What, Harvey? What is it?”
“Un-fucking-believable. That’s what,” he said without slowing his gait.
She grabbed his arm to stop him. “Harvey?”
He pulled away from her, avoiding confrontation, silently weighing whether or not to keep the truth from her. When he glanced back at her, she was frowning, not in disapproval, but in sorrow of her own inability to read his mind. When they were man and wife, he had been unable to keep secrets from her. He realized he didn’t want that to change. “It’s a text from my real estate lawyer.”
She smiled at him like she was winding up a snarky aside until he clarified it was all business. “They’ve stopped the removal of all the windows.”
All traces of her signature smartassiness fell off her face. “What do you mean?”
“Jackass Jacques. That’s what. He’s just served me a cease and desist notice for the demolition of the train depot. The city has granted him a forty-eight hour stay, preventing me from doing anything with the property until he has a chance to hire a third party expert to review the building and determine its historical significance.” He suddenly burst into unsettling laughter. It was just too damn precious.
She peered at him, struggling to put the pieces together. “Who could he possibly intend to hire?”
Harvey’s gaze locked onto hers. If there was one time in his whole life that he wished he didn’t want her back, it was now. “You.”
Chapter Seventeen
“Bonjour, mon chéri!” Jacques’ flamboyant greeting rang out throughout the store, mimicking the high-pitched bell announcing his entrance into the shop. “I have some news magnifique to tell you! I have saved the train depot from Monsieur Money Monster, Harvey Zale.”